Kim Yo Jong, the most powerful figure in North Korea after her brother Kim Jong Un, issued a direct military threat against Japan on Wednesday, warning that Pyongyang would develop “additional military options” in response to Tokyo’s expanding defense posture — and explicitly accusing Washington of enabling what she called the revival of a “war criminal state.”
The statement, published by the Korean Central News Agency, was both specific in its grievances and deliberately vague in its threatened response. Kim cited Japan’s recent test-firing of Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles — American-supplied weapons that give Japan’s Self-Defense Forces their first real offensive reach — as well as Japan’s May participation in U.S.-led military exercises in the Philippines. She accused Tokyo of moving to “formulate the possession of the capability for preemptive attack” and said those actions were entering “the stage of actual act.” In a direct shot at Washington, she condemned the United States for using Japan and South Korea as a “shock brigade” in the Asia-Pacific, encroaching on the security interests of neighboring states.
“Japan, a war criminal state, is accelerating its transformation into a war state, taking advantage of the acute and variable trend of the present international situation,” Kim stated per KCNA. “We will never remain a passive onlooker to the military evolution of Japan, which may pose a grave threat to the security of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” She concluded with a formal declaration: “I make it clear upon authorization that the armed forces of the DPRK and the military leadership will set up additional military options, which are obviously due to Japan’s transformation.”
Japan’s defense posture has shifted dramatically over the past two years. Under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s legacy framework and continued by his successor, Japan has committed to doubling defense spending as a share of GDP — a structural break from the postwar pacifist constitution’s constraints that Tokyo spent eight decades trying to work around. Japan has deployed Type-12 surface-to-ship missiles and U.S.-supplied Tomahawk cruise missiles to its Southwestern Islands, the chain that runs between Kyushu and Taiwan, directly complicating any Chinese or North Korean calculus in the region. Tokyo’s defense minister stated as recently as Tuesday that Japan’s military needs to be expanded with a “sense of urgency and crisis,” per Channel News Asia, following a new government threat assessment that specifically named China, Russia, and North Korea as growing dangers requiring an immediate response.
The framing Kim Yo Jong deployed is worth unpacking, because Pyongyang’s propaganda rarely wastes specific language. By invoking Japan’s colonial-era record — a reference that carries enormous weight throughout East Asia — and then linking it to current military policy, she is positioning North Korea as the historical victim entitled to a security response. This narrative has more resonance in China and across Global South capitals than Western audiences typically appreciate. Beijing uses similar framing about Japanese militarism when it wants to create diplomatic space for opposing U.S.-Japan defense cooperation, and Pyongyang coordinates its messaging with Beijing more closely than most Western analysts acknowledge. The question is not whether Kim Yo Jong’s statement constitutes an existential threat on its own — it does not — but whether it signals an upcoming weapons test, a new missile deployment, or an acceleration of Pyongyang’s tactical nuclear force positioning toward Japan.
The timing is also notable in that Japan is watching Taiwan’s Han Kuang war games begin on the same day. Japan understands better than most Western nations that a Taiwan contingency is a Japan contingency — U.S. bases in Okinawa and on the main islands would be the immediate staging grounds for any American response to a Taiwan blockade or invasion. North Korea’s ability to threaten those bases with short-range missiles is real and has been since at least 2017. A Pyongyang that feels emboldened by China’s regional pressure campaign, or that calculates it can extract economic concessions by rattling sabers while Washington is distracted in the Middle East, has every structural incentive to escalate its rhetoric in exactly this direction.
Hellbound and Down 
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